Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin

If you think conferences aimed at programmers are only for them, think again. I wrote about my experiences at ACCU 2011 on TechTarget. Take a chance and try a conference that doesn’t seem tailor-made for you!

The latest issue of Agile Record is out, and includes some terrific articles by Gojko Adzic, Jurgen Appelo, Ellen Gottesdiener, Johanna Rothman, Linda Rising, Catherine Powell and several more – what an incredibly talented and diverse group of contributors! My “Agile Testing in Real Life” column is about practicing our software development (that includes testing) skills. I like to lead by example, so in this article I recount everything I’ve done so far this year to grow my own skills and become a better software tester.

To what are you devoting  your 10,000 hours of practice?

Yesterday I had a call from a participant in my recent BayAPLN session. I completely screwed up and, when I tried to save the phone message, I deleted it, and somehow the number that my phone saved, I could not call back. So, I’d like to try to answer the question, as best I remember it, here. If you still have questions, please email me, because this is such an important topic.

Since I listened to this question in my car and could not write it down, I don’t have it exactly, but it was along the lines of: “My team has no automated testing. One of our user stories did not have all the testing completed by the end of the sprint, because there was not time to complete the manual tests. Would you please recommend tools to help us?”

I know of a lot of great testing tools, GUI drivers and frameworks. If you want to do GUI testing, you can’t go wrong with Canoo WebTest, Selenium, Watir. Robot Framework, FitNesse and other frameworks can be used for testing at the API level or combined with a driver for testing through the GUI. Those are just a few examples of what’s available. Even better, your team can write its own testing frameworks and harnesses.

But tools aren’t the point. The point is that the best people to solve your testing problems is your own development team. By “development team”, I mean programmers, testers, BAs, DBAs, sys admins, everyone involved in delivering software. If you aren’t delivering user stories in a sprint because testing isn’t finished, you need to look at that problem as a team. By bringing all your team’s different roles, experiences and viewpoints to bear on this problem, you will think of experiments to try, and you will arrive at solutions.

Give yourselves time to experiment. Engage everyone involved in delivering software in solving the issues of getting all testing activities done each sprint or iteration. This diversity of viewpoints means you will eventually succeed. YOUR TEAM can solve this problem. Give it a chance!

I wrote up my experiences at the excellent Belgium Testing Days conference which took place in February. In particular, I thought about what is different for me at conferences outside the U.S. compared with “domestic” conferences. They’re all great learning and networking opportunities, but culture makes for some nice differences. Overall it was a wonderful time and I’m still thinking how to apply everything I learned. Read about it on SearchSoftwareQuality.

In the late 90s I worked as a tester (I cringe now remembering my title, “Quality Boss”) at Trip.com. We were a waterfall shop (hadn’t heard of XP, Scrum or the like yet) with some talented programmers and testers. Until it was sold, it was a wonderful place to work. The CEO really cared about the employees, as well as the customers.

Working on one big project, someone started a whiteboard with funny things developers said during the coding and testing phases. The programmers took some of the choice quotes and embedded them in an Easter egg in the application. I printed them off for posterity, which is good, because that particular application was short-lived (though Trip.com lives on as Cheaptickets.com, and the url for the app still redirects there).

I am sure these are quotes you’ve all heard before! The Easter egg was invoked by some combination of inputs and keystrokes in the UI, and resulted in a page that said:

“An error has occurred — when asked about the problem, our developers would probably respond with:”

One of the following responses would come up, randomly:

• “I could just do it so it works”
• “Have you been able to get anything to compile?”
• “If you don’t think that it’s your fault, blame the tools”
• “Hmmm…. That’s bad”
• “It’s working for me”
• “We found out why the query page isn’t working… there’s something weird going on”
• “Who needs error checking?!”
• “Just add more memory”
• “Never show your code your fear.”
• “Sweeeeeet!”
• “Oh, it doesn’t compile? Just comment that part out.”
• “In order to fix the bug, you must become the bug.”

Reading these gave me a laugh and brought back many good memories. But there was bitter with the sweet. Though we successfully delivered the functionality of this project, the product people had failed to communicate (and we had failed to elicit) their number one priority – the search results had to come up within some short amount of time, and they didn’t. The project was a failure.

About a year later, the company was sold, one of the programmers discovered XP Explained by Kent Beck, and we all left to form a new startup and try XP. The rest is history! :->

My Agile Testing Days tutorial is almost full, so my motivation here is not to advertise it, but to invite you to meet one of my donkeys, Ernest. I tried to make the video with both Ernest and Chester, but it was very windy outdoors that day and Chester was fidgety, we couldn’t get a good video. My friend Anna suggested taking Ernest indoors to do the video, so we went in the living room and it worked just fine. It’s short, please enjoy!

I’m a volunteer on the Diversity in Agile project founded by Mike Sutton and supported by the Agile Alliance.

For reasons I don’t understand, some people have misunderstood the first phase of the project, which seeks to recognize and celebrate the contributions of women in agile development, as an awards program for women. Some people even thought it was only for women in testing.

Jon Bach asked me a good question. A couple of weeks ago, our Writing About Testing group held a conference in Durango, CO. The group was nicely balanced with as many women as men. Jon asked me what advantages I felt this gave the conference. He found my reply helpful and encouraged me to share it here. I’ve done so, with edits to make it more understandable to people who weren’t there. I hope others will find it helpful.

(Some others are finding this still makes them uncomfortable. I guess this is just such a delicate issue, it’s hard to express my feelings without offending someone. But as we are losing women from our industry at an alarming rate, I feel like I have to take the risk of pissing a few people off. Please take this in the spirit that I have the best intentions at heart. And think about this – would you want to work on a homogeneous team? Yes, gender is only one part of diversity. It happens to be the first area that the Diversity in Agile project is recognizing.)

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I’m sure the advantages of having a lot of women at WAT were different for each participant. And while I thought “wow, this is rare, I’m in a room with lots of women”, it wasn’t on my mind all the time.

For me, some advantages that may have been due to the gender balance were:

• I felt much more comfortable with a lot of women in the group. This wasn’t so much conscious, as just a feeling of ease and belonging that I don’t always feel on my almost-all-male dev team.
• I find women are in general more active at collaborating and communicating, especially in a new setting. I think we had a lot of good energy and jumping into the exercises and great conversations because we were a diverse group.
• Seeing other women contribute built my own confidence that I could contribute. I’m not saying that men in general try to reduce my confidence level. But I think most of us feel better with peers around. (Not to say men aren’t my peers – but they aren’t as much alike to me as other women are).
  
• This is a note I wrote down when Marlena Compton was talking, I’m not sure if she said it or if it’s just a thought she generated in me:
  • “It’s easy to not feel safe if you aren’t sure about your thoughts. You need a space safe enough to get thoughts out. “
• I feel more personal safety when there are more women in the room. I think it might be because other women are also thinking about safety, so they make an effort  to provide it. (Again, I am not saying that men do not care about personal safety or do not make an effort to provide it. I just don’t get the same feeling in a room full of only men.) Also in my notes is:
  
  • If you’ve got something to say, try to say it in a safe place. Don’t invest all your weight into your initial foray – get some feedback from a trusted peer group.
  • I’m not sure if Marlena said that but I’m pretty sure it was one of the women. So, generally I felt I was getting more support and information about personal safety and confidence from the women in the room.

• This is a gross generalization of course – but some men in the room talked about using anger as motivation for writing (which I do understand, it’s not a bad thing) while I felt women were coming more from a point of view of joy. For example, Elisabeth Hendrickson‘s stunt hamsters and pandas added an element of fun.
  
• I feel that because there were so many diverse viewpoints in the room, I got a lot more ideas than from a group of only men. I can’t prove this, of course. But I’m thinking of Elisabeth’s slides with her panda and hamster people, Chris McMahon‘s software development-as-artistic talk, the haiku exercise, donkey energy, the “P”s of motivation, we had a huge variety of ideas that I don’t think we’d have had with a less diverse group. (sorry, for those of you who weren’t there, I don’t have room to explain all those things, they will be blogged about later!)

I love the guys I work with, but I find I often have a point of view that’s different from theirs. Of course, it’s hard for me to know how much of my different viewpoint is just because I’m a tester. We’ve worked together so long, this has changed over the years, as we’ve all influenced each other.

But I remember at first, when there was only one other woman on the team, I was a bit shocked at the way they joked around – insults that were playful, but to an outsider it was a bit shocking, I couldn’t always tell if they were kidding. I don’t think they’d have had this aspect of their culture with more women around, though I could be wrong.

When all the guys play Quake every afternoon, and scream and cuss and pound the desk, they’re having a great time; the other woman on the team and I can enjoy that they are having fun, but we don’t feel like joining in. On a previous all-male team I worked with, I felt left out when they celebrated success by playing Foosball (which I’m no good at – though I do know women who love to play) or went to a movie I really didn’t want to go see (but I went anyway, which expanded my horizons – I learned to love X-Men!)  I really enjoyed having more women on my team back in the day when there were more female programmers.
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I would appreciate any suggestions to make the Women in Agile site communicate our mission more clearly.

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There are some other posts on this issue at CowboyTesting and Lanette Creamer‘s blog,